Through a Crystal Darkly
by jarethsdragon
Summary: Sarah beat the Labyrinth and returned to her world many many years ago. When Jareth watches her through his crystal, he hears something surprising.


Disclaimer: I do not, nor probably will I ever own more than a copy of the Labyrinth DVD. Others own that--go them--and all I own is.... well.... err.  
Wait! I own Ashely..... :D  
  
Through a Crystal, Darkly  
  
Jareth idly twirled a set of three crystals in his fingers. The last of the Labyrinth travelers for today had been dispatched, his baby sister held in careful, more reverent hands. He wouldn't likely forget the harsh lessons he had learned tonight.  
  
So now all was quiet--or as quiet as could be expected from a kingdom housing goblins could be. The sun was vanishing behind the far wall of the Labyrinth, bathing it in warm, golden light and Jareth's throne room in brilliant reds and orange. From this window, Jareth had watched the little boy sprint up the steps, Hoggle panting behind him and Sir Didymous trotting around, rounding up the goblins. The boy had demanded his little sister back with only one squeak in his voice, then had attacked viciously, scratching and pummeling Jareth's legs. Poor kid wasn't any taller than the Goblin King's intricately tooled leather belt.  
  
Now the goblins could begin cleaning up. By tomorrow, sunrise, the town would be bustling with activity again--unlike that other time.  
  
Jareth watched the sun set through the crystals. In a more casual shirt and slacks, and sandals now instead of the stiff boots, he listened to the sleepy sounds around him. The goblins had wandered home to dinners and families and squealing games with their children, leaving their King to his own devices. So, he sat in the window, twirling and watching, a sentinel as silent as any sand faced gargoyle.  
  
Idleness, boredom and restlessness--the bane of Jareth's existence--settled around him like bad friends. Day by day he survived--survived the idiocy of the goblins and the challengers to the Labyrinth and the raging headaches that plagued him when he thought he couldn't take it anymore. Some days he just sat in his throne, his face in his hand, praying for day's end to bring him silence and relative peace.  
  
Jareth conjured another crystal and placed it on top of the three spinning ones. Peering at it intently, he summoned the image of Sarah Williams.  
  
She was older now--of course. No longer the girl-child who had torn his world apart. Actually, he had torn it apart--re-ordering time and space to prevent Toby's fate and to steal just a few more moments of her time before her final decision. She--the girl he had offered everything he had and everything he would ever have--had turned it down. Why? He liked to think it was out of duty--duty to see her brother home. A Lady worthy of the title would do her duty before she followed her heart.  
  
So, he had sent her back to her life Aboveground. And watched and waited. She had pursued theater--becoming a minor star until some aunt or other had left her an old bit of property. This peculiar building--with an apartment in the top and a storefront in the bottom--had sparked Sarah's imagination. She still took parts and was studying to become a director, but mostly she ran a store of odds and ends. She had amused him endlessly, pondering names and stock and creating her own little corner and filling it with her dreams.  
  
"Dreaming Crystal" was a smashing success in the community. The young women and men flocked to the little shop. Sarah had purposefully built bookcases and racks at charming, odd angles and passages that doubled back on themselves. The racks held an assortment of clothes--embroidered poet's blouses, sleek trousers, long dresses of Gothic or medieval design, t-shirts with dragons and wizards painted on them, funny vests with faces on the back and costume accessories. The shelves held just about anything--statuettes and figurines of goblins, trolls, gnomes, and wizards, herbs, scarves, wands of ash or dogwood or kudzu, candles of every description, original artwork, crystals of various sizes and shapes, models, incense, and more. And not for long--periodically, she'd wander through and switch everything around--even the bookcases, which she had rigged on casters to allow them to be moved around on the wood floor.  
  
The only thing that didn't change was the small area in front where she had set up a hodgepodge of chairs and tables and a sofa and a recliner. The customers would hang out there. Once in a great while, someone would bring a guitar and sing softly some melody, but often it was a small group who studied, read, or played some fantasy game. Quite often Sarah would have Enigma, Enya or similar music playing, although occasionally she'd branch out into Clannad or Gregorian chants. One of her patrons had carved her a false front, allowing her to hide her stereo set up behind a facade of book spines.  
  
Sarah was tallying the day's receipts, closing up the cash register and cleaning up the pile of CDs she had played. A group over to one side was picking up dice, papers and pencils, stuffing books and cards into backpacks and yawning. Sarah smiled at them as several left with cheerful goodbyes.  
  
A young blonde with brown eyes lingered, gazing longingly at an exquisite dreamcatcher with beads of tiger's eye strung on its fine webbing and white feathers shifting softly in the breeze. Jareth peered closer, listening in on their conversation.  
  
"--You'll know it when you see it," Sarah was replying to the girl's query with a slightly distant look.  
  
"Really, Ms. Sarah?" the girl queried. "I'll just know?"  
  
"Yes," Sarah sighed. "It may be like a flash of lightning. Or it may be like the warmth of spring after winter, but you'll know love when it comes to you."  
  
"I think that I love Robbie--" the girl said thoughtfully. "I think so--but I don't know so. He's so arrogant sometimes...." Her voice trailed off into silence.  
  
Sarah looked up at the girl, nibbling her pencil. "Really?"  
  
"Yeah," the girl replied quietly. "He's always talking about how nice he's being--going out with me, I mean." She blushed. "He says that no one else would have me, so I'm lucky that he noticed me. And I am--I AM lucky--" she hastily reassured Sarah. "He's on the football team--the quarterback, after all."  
  
"I'm not sure that he's what you should be looking for," Sarah said carefully. "Perhaps you should find someone who makes you feel good about yourself...."  
  
The girl laughed mirthlessly. "Yeah--that's what Mike says. He says that if I were interested in looking, then I'd find LOTS of guys."  
  
"Mike?"  
  
"He's my friend. It's kind of weird." The girl frowned for a moment, and then began fiddling with a triangular shaped die. "He's always trying to build me up and to encourage me--even if it means leaving Robbie and going to France this summer like I want to." Her eyes blinked wetly. "I don't know what I'd do without Mike."  
  
Sarah smiled wisely. For a moment, the moonlight filtered through the stained glass window, improbably perched high on the wall, above the bookcase and cash register and Sarah seemed to glow for a moment. "A very wise person said that love isn't about who you can live with--it's who you can't live without." She nibbled on her pencil one more time. "And that's the love that will last."  
  
The girl stared at Sarah for a moment, dropping everything into a beaten up backpack. "Really?"  
  
Sarah blushed. "Really."  
  
"You sound like you... kind of know what it's like."  
  
Sarah sighed. "Yes, I suppose that I did." She slid her receipts into her ledger book. "It was a long time ago."  
  
"What happened?"  
  
Sarah's head dropped for a moment. "I -- It's hard to explain. I don't know if I let him go or if he let me go or if we just parted or what. He was everything that I had dreamed about--handsome, dashing, witty and had a sense of humor--even if that humor was caustic. He was determined and strong willed....."  
  
"He sounds nice."  
  
Sarah grimaced. Or grinned--it was hard to tell. "I think so, too, now. At the time, I was mad and childishly took out my frustrations on him." She sighed. "It was really silly."  
  
"What happened to him?"  
  
"I don't really know. I suppose he's gone on with his life. It's been years--and I suppose that he's forgotten about me." Sarah folded her hands around her cup of tea and leaned on her counter. "I haven't forgotten him--or what he did for me.... and I've never seen him again."  
  
The girl's eyes welled up with tears. "Oh.... how sad."  
  
Sarah glanced up at the girl. "Now don't start that--I've cried oceans for him--there's no sense in you doing the same." She sighed. "Particularly when it was mostly my fault."  
  
"So you told him goodbye?"  
  
"In a way, yes." Sarah began fidgeting around with various things, starting to lock up. "Like I said, it was many years ago and I was being a brat." Sarah glanced up at the girl with a serious look on her face. "Can I tell you something, Ashley?"  
  
"Sure...." Ashley sat down on the upholstered arm of a chair, slinging her backpack into the seat.  
  
"Ashley, you are at a great time in your life--when you are forming the basis for the rest of your life. This time only comes once in each life and you make your choices--good and bad." Sarah plopped on a chair across from her, cradling her cup of tea. "Then you life your life based on those choices. Are you going to go into politics? Accounting? Lion-taming? Teaching politics to accountant lions?"  
  
Ashley giggled.  
  
"But if there is something that I've learned--and learned the hard way--it's that those choices are yours and you never get to unmake them. So, logically, you make the best choices you can." Ashley nodded at Sarah's raised eyebrows and Sarah continued. "But some decisions needn't be made right away. You can wait on them. Some others you have to make your choice, grab it tight and let everything else fall where it may.  
  
"Love is like that. You'll know it when you see it. It's the one person who can cheer you up on a gloomy day. It's the little kernel of warmth and peace that makes the rest of the world seem sane. It's the feeling of blooming like a rose under tender hands who nurture you and want to build you into something better--even if that means tearing down. It's the feeling of magic to the grey of the world.  
  
"And when you find that, Ashley, grab onto it with both hands. Even if you can't know that you can't hold on to it for long. No matter what, you grab that and hold on for everything that you're worth. You don't let go when it gets tough. You don't make noble gestures or meaningless poses. You hold and dig your claws in and cling to it.  
  
"You'll know it's love. I promise."  
  
Ashley thought about it for a moment.  
  
"What if I make a mistake? Don't know it in time?"  
  
Sarah chuckled dryly. "At one point, I would have said that you'll always get a second chance if it's true love. Now, I realize that if you choose to let it go, you'll spend every moment of the rest of your life mourning it. No amount of rationalization or posturing about how "I didn't know" or "I did the right thing at the time" or whatever excuses you make will ever take that pain away."  
  
"Is that what happened to you?"  
  
"I told myself that I was doing the noble thing. That I was letting him go because I had a duty to do elsewhere. That he was too old or handsome or couldn't possibly be interested in me. Or that I hated him and hated guys who were so handsome that they just HAD to have tons of other women hanging off around. That I was going to reach out to him later and explain why I made the choices that I did.  
  
"And I figured out that I couldn't tell him that I made the choice to say goodbye to him--to hurt him--was because it was what everyone said was the adult thing to do. I couldn't tell him that I was foolish and prideful and did a pointless gesture that I thought made me more adult. Later I told myself it was too late--that he'd found someone else and was undoubtedly not interested in me.  
  
Sarah sighed. "Then one day I looked into the mirror and saw the person staring back at me. She was old and alone." Sarah sighed. "And that person in the mirror was ashamed of what she had become--spinning her wheels round and round trying to blame him for my choices. Say it was his fault because he was older than me. Say it was his fault because he was dashing and exotic. Saying it was his fault because he tricked me and how could I believe anything he said? But it was all my fault because I was scared.  
  
"I was scared, mostly of him leaving me. But I should have known better.  
  
She took Ashley's hands in her own. "Ashley, whatever you do, promise me that you won't make the mistake I did. I threw my chance at my once-in-a-lifetime love away. If you find it--no matter when or in what form--then promise me you'll hold on to it as tightly as you can. Even if you believe you can't hold on for long.  
  
"Because our love may be snatched away in a moment--shattered like a crystal. You can't tell the future and can't tell when love will end. But it's worth grabbing and knowing that you did your best to hold on to it. Then, when it goes, it's without regrets. I regret every day of my life that I didn't at least try to hold on to him. I regret that I threw it all away--an on all the stupid things I threw it away on what I assumed others would possibly think of me more highly for. I regret that I lost touch with him and that I grew old without him." Her voice lowered to scant whisper. "I regret that I never told him that I loved him."  
  
"But aren't those excuses too?" Ashley said in all innocence.  
  
Sarah grimaced. "Perhaps." She nodded. "Perhaps you're right. I've always been scared."  
  
"You, Miss Sarah? Scared?"  
  
Sarah nodded. "I was scared of growing up and give up my fantasies. I was scared to be an adult and to take charge of my life. I was scared to stand up for myself and then, after I met him, I was scared to love him because I had to face all of that. I was scared of disappointing him. And because I was scared--I lost him." Sarah's voice cracked and a tear slid down her cheek.  
  
"Oh," Ashley whispered. "How sad...."  
  
Sarah nodded again. "I suppose. But you didn't come here to listen to an old woman cry. Go on back." She waved her hands at the blonde girl. "I've got to lock up. And remember what I said about regrets."  
  
Jareth pulled back a little, pondering. Ashley's form stood up and spoke a few more words, and Sarah bid her goodnight, locking up the store and dousing the lights. Soon the precariously perched crystal was a maze of shade and shadow as Sarah turned off all the little lamps. He could see her passing through a narrow passageway between two bookcases, groaning in their excess of treasure. Then, she stopped and glanced around.  
  
Jareth leaned in, concentrating on her form.  
  
Sarah carefully pushed aside a low hanging scarf of sparkling blue that was dangling down. A tiny china figure of a white owl on a branch stood beside two or three loose incense cones. A thin, red leather covered book whose gold stamping was long worn off leaned against the side of the bookcase. And on a small gold stand was a perfect sphere of crystal. A few flakes of glitter were strewn over the treasures like an afterthought. With a wary finger, Sarah stroked the crystal. Handling it with care, she tipped it into her hands and cradled it in her palms.  
  
Sarah rolled the crystal around her palms, staring at her distorted reflection and hands. Her hair now sported clumps of silver at her temples. Her knuckles hurt before a rainstorm now, and had veins showing on the backs. She had a spread of crow's feet at the corners of her eyes and a bit of a paunch. She had slight lines across her forehead and around her mouth--"laugh" lines drawn by tears as well. She had a slight scar on her tummy from where her appendix was removed, and a few marks from various bumps and bruises and a tiny band-aid on her leg where she nicked herself shaving.  
  
Sarah concentrated for a moment on the crystal in her palms, watching it spin round and round. Then, so softly he only barely caught it, she whispered "I do love you. I always have." 


End file.
